Microsoft Releases In-Memory Ready SQL Server 2014

Microsoft SQL Server 2014 has been released to manufacturing, the company announced on Tuesday, promising general availability of the product on April 1. The company also announced the general availability of Hadoop 2.2 support in its Windows Azure HDInsight service, bringing support for YARN and Stinger (Hive SQL Query) improvements to the vendor’s cloud-based Hadoop service.

Any release of Microsoft SQL Server is important, as it’s the world’s top database management system (DBMS) in terms of unit sales. But the 2014 update is particularly important as it introduces an In-Memory OLTP (online transaction processing) option that promises breakthroughs in performance.

“In-memory transaction processing speeds up an already very fast experience by delivering speed improvement of up to 30x,” wrote Quentin Clark, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Data Platform Group, in a blog announcing the release.

As InformationWeek recently detailed in an in-depth cover story on in-memory databases, Microsoft beta customers have used In-Memory OLTP to get around disk I/O-throughput bottlenecks and read-write contention without rewriting applications designed to run on SQL Server. Gaming company Bwin.party, for example, used the feature to scale up an online sports-betting app to handle 150,000 bets per second that was previously limited to 12,000 bets per second. The only change required was moving selected database tables to run in memory.